Membership

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A fraternal membership organization is a club or group created around a shared interest or philosophy. Ours is pretty clear. We want to be actively involved in doing something about our nation’s food poverty. Fraternal benefits organization, qualifying fraternal society, and more names vary between the IRS and each state, but their independent qualifications are for tax classification. They don’t change the core definition.

We wanted to be more than a fundraiser, even if that meant being fewer in number. We wanted to be more involved, and for our members to be too. Yes. The money is important. But, so is being there to share an event and help make it a success, or getting the word out about a new measure supporting food pantries to help get it through a local legislature, or being able to respond quickly to a crisis creating emergency needs. So is the pride of involvement. In fact, it’s infectious.

We do have social media accounts, but we find only a tiny percentage of followers actually see social media posts. While we understand it’s against all conventional wisdom on the topic, our time is most effectively devoted to old school direct communication with existing members. We’d rather have you with us here and know we can keep you up to date than struggle to reach 5% of you over there.

We started as a project in a small culinary outfit in 2015, mostly raising money and coordinating drives for local meals programs and food banks. We’ve been an independent organization with this larger focus and under this name since June of 2023.

Members provide 100 meal blocks at $21 each. You can choose to give as many or as few as you want monthly, quarterly, biannually, or even just once per year. For a full explanation of the $21 figure, see our Why 100 page.

No. We ask members to commit to a certain number of meals if they can. We make it easy with options as low as just once per year, and by giving you total control. You can change your support level yourself at any time in the member area, no questions asked.

We have one paid administrative position and a small marketing budget. Everything else and everyone else we need to function is graciously provided through volunteerism, right down to this website and our email services. We do not have CEO perks, bonuses, or any other surprises that can interfere with our usual allocation process. After the bank’s standard payment processing fee and those small but necessary costs, it all goes to the food banks and crisis response.

We don’t solicit donations outside our membership. We rarely ask members for help with a special appeal, like a crisis response that needs more than we can give without taking anything away from the food banks. For the most part, we do our best to manage with regular member support. If you’d like to make a donation, becoming a member is easy and you’re on the right page!

No. As a fraternal membership organization, members do have rights, including voting rights when we make substantial changes to where money goes or our structure. You’ll see more details on that in the sign up form. But whether or not you vote, or are involved in events, or communicate with us about issues, or do anything else, is completely up to you. Some people will want to be involved in everything and some people might only be able to jump in once in a while when something’s local.